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HIPAA Risk Assessment

HIPAA Risk Assessment: What is it and How Often Should You Have One?

A 2021 study based on information from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) found that between 2018 and 2021, the frequency of data breaches involving healthcare facilities grew by 84%. By 2021, there were 41.45 million victims worldwide, a sharp increase from 14 million in 2018. Additionally, data from the HHS Cybersecurity Program shows that the number of healthcare breaches in the first five months of 2022 has nearly doubled from the same period in the previous year (1).

Positively, there are steps you may do to avoid being just another victim of these data breach findings. Due to this, a HIPAA risk assessment is essential. A HIPAA risk assessment is a prerequisite for everyone who wants to improve the security of their sensitive information and become HIPAA compliant.

In this article, we explain what a risk assessment comprises, how to do one, and how frequently it ought to be done. For your convenience, we've also added a checklist to help clarify the process.

HIPAA risk assessment: what is it?

HIPAA risk assessment must be used by organisations to locate, prioritise, and handle any security breaches. This internal audit review examines how protected health information (PHI) is maintained and secured. Because it may be used to identify security flaws and increase data protection, it is advantageous to enterprises (1,2).

To protect PHI from breaches and other vulnerabilities, the HIPAA Security Rule mandates that covered companies and their business partners do HIPAA security risk assessments (1,2).

Why are HIPAA risk assessments important?

Many patients' medical records are kept electronically. As a result, their electronic protected health information (ePHI) may have been compromised.

Organizations must regularly examine their security posture in order to spot vulnerabilities and continuously secure patient information; a HIPAA risk assessment is one way to do this and is necessary for HIPAA compliance (1).

Failure to abide with HIPAA laws may incur high fines, harm to the reputation of the offending company, and in some cases, criminal consequences. You may maintain information security and avoid fines and penalties for HIPAA laws violations by using updated security risk assessments.

How to Conduct a HIPAA Risk Analysis

HIPAA doesn’t mention specific rules for how a risk analysis should be performed, because it recognizes that the needs and vulnerabilities of covered entities and business associates are different from one another, and different-sized organizations will have access to different levels of resources.

However, an entity must still be capable of proving that it has performed a HIPAA risk analysis, and each HIPAA assessment must take several factors into account when being conducted (2).

Determine the Scope

The scope of your risk assessment will take into account all potential threats to PHI, the hardware used to store ePHI, and the locations where PHI is physically or electronically kept.

You should record where PHI is kept, acquired, maintained, and transmitted in addition to the scope (2).

Identify Potential Vulnerabilities

Any dangers that could result in a PHI breach need to be investigated and documented by organisations. Looking through previous or present initiatives, conducting personnel interviews, and examining paperwork can all help with this (1,2).

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